Putin Bans Protests at Games

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and IOC President Jacques Rogge.

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MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an executive order banning protests in and around the 2014 Winter Olympics site in Sochi for a 10-week period that includes the Games.

The order, which was signed Aug. 19 and printed in Russia’s official government newspaper on Friday, says “meetings, rallies, demonstrations, parades and pickets that aren’t tied to the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, and that are planned from Jan. 7 to March 21, 2014, should take place at another time.”

The order comes amid a Western outcry over a new Russian regulation—known colloquially as the “gay propaganda” law—that prohibits people in Russia from publicly condoning “nontraditional relationships” in front of minors. The law, which levies fines for actions that promote “the social equivalence of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations,” has led some in the U.S. to call for a boycott of the 2014 Games. President Barack Obama, however, has ruled out such a move.

The executive order published Friday isn’t the first Russian regulation to tamp down on public demonstrations. Russia’s Parliament introduced new restrictions on public gatherings in June 2012, stepping up punishments for unauthorized rallies just a few months after mass demonstrations against Putin’s rule swept Moscow.

Friday’s order sets out a range of security precautions ahead of the Olympics in Sochi, which is located a few hundred miles from areas in Russia’s North Caucasus that have been battling an Islamist insurgency for years. It creates a so-called “forbidden zone”—to which only authorized personnel and vehicles will be allowed access—that stretches for miles around the Black Sea resort city.

It also prescribes special “antiterrorist protection measures” for potential targets in and around Sochi, restricts both the airspace and the water area around the Olympic park, limits vehicle traffic and provides for “specially equipped checkpoints for the examination of individuals” to be installed at the site.

The executive order was published a day after the International Olympic Committee said it received a letter from Dmitry Kozak, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of handling the Games, guaranteeing that everyone would be welcome at the Games “regardless of their sexual orientation.”